Jaffery eBook

Jaffery protested. It was dear of her, sweet
of her, miraculous of her, but he couldn’t dream
of it.

“Then don’t,” she retorted.
“Put it out of your mind. And there’s
Franklin. Come to dinner.”

“I’m not a bit hungry,” he said
gloomily.

We dined; as far as I was concerned, very pleasantly.
Liosha, who sat on my right, refreshingly free in
her table manners (embarrassingly so to my most correct
butler), was equally free in her speech. She provided
me with excellent entertainment. I learned many
frank truths about Albanian women, for whom, on account
of their vaccine subjection, she proclaimed the most
scathing contempt. Her details, in architectural
phrase, were full size. Once or twice Doria,
who sat on my left, lowered her eyes disapprovingly.
At her age, her mother would have been shocked; her
grandmother would have blushed from toes to forehead;
her great-grandmother might have fainted. But
Doria, a Twentieth Century product, on the Committee
of a Maternity Home and a Rescue Laundry, merely looked
down her nose . . . I gathered that Liosha, for
all her yearning to shoot, flay alive, crucify and
otherwise annoy her enemies, did not greatly regret
the loss of the distinguished young Albanian cutthroat
who was her affianced. Had he lived she would
have spent the rest of her days in saying, like Melisande,
“I am not happy.” She would have
been an instrument of pleasure, a producer of children,
a slaving drudge, while he went triumphantly about,
a predatory ravisher, among the scattered Bulgarian
peasantry. In fact, she expressed a whole-hearted
detestation for her betrothed. I am pretty sure,
too, that the death of her father did not leave in
her life the aching gap that it might have done.

You see, it came to this. Her father, an American-Albanian,
wanted to run with the hare of barbarism and hunt
with the hounds of civilisation. His daughter
(woman the world over) was all for hunting. He
had spent twenty years in America. By a law of
gravitation, natural only in that Melting Pot of Nations,
Chicago, he had come across an Albanian wife. . .
.

Chicago is the Melting Pot of the nations of the world.
Let me tell you a true tale. It has nothing whatever
to do with Jaffery Chayne or Liosha—­except
perhaps to shew that there is no reason why a Tierra
del Fuegan foundling should not run across his long-lost
brother on Michigan Avenue, and still less reason
why Albanian male should not meet Albanian female
in Armour’s stockyards. And besides, considering
that I was egged on, as I said on the first page,
to write these memoirs, I really don’t see why
I should not put into them anything I choose.